vlambeer – PlayStation.Bloghttp://blog.us.playstation.com
Official PlayStation Blog for news and video updates on PS4, PS3, PSN, PS Vita, PSPFri, 09 Dec 2016 16:56:02 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.3http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/cropped-PS-Bug-32x32.jpgvlambeer – PlayStation.Bloghttp://blog.us.playstation.com
3232Nuclear Throne: You Did Not Reach the Nuclear Thronehttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/11/09/nuclear-throne-you-did-not-reach-the-nuclear-throne/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/11/09/nuclear-throne-you-did-not-reach-the-nuclear-throne/#commentsMon, 09 Nov 2015 15:00:20 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=165483In Nuclear Throne, your goal is simple: reach the Nuclear Throne. It’s a brutal mix of fast-paced, top-down action, random generation, permadeath, and player choice — and honestly, you probably won’t stand a chance. More than anything, the result of your run will be seven simple words: “You did not reach the Nuclear Throne.”

To the two of us at Vlambeer and the four others who have been working on the game for the past 2.5 years, there’s something exciting about making a game that’s intentionally mean to you in every possible way, without becoming unfair. When we set out to make this game, we wanted to make a game that would be fun to play for us as its creators — something even we couldn’t fully predict.

Nuclear Throne did that, and then we made it harder and added more content. We continued adding little mean things to the game until eventually our gaming skills were pushed to the absolute limit. We didn’t stop pushing until we saw that dreaded “Did Not Reach” pop up because of mimics we forgot about while playing, or enemies that snuck up on us and ended our runs with a single well-placed hit.

In Nuclear Throne, you choose one of twelve mutants to reach that Nuclear Throne. Each of them has a passive and an active ability — sometimes simple, such as a temporary shield or higher ammo drops, and sometimes ridiculous, such as interdimensional airstrikes and the ability to fight on as a headless chicken after you die. When you get better at the game, you will get access to their own powerful Throne Butt or even more powerful Ultra abilities for your current run.

A mutant can carry two weapons at once, and there are approximately 125 weapons in Nuclear Throne. Some of them are the usual fare, pistols, machineguns, screwdrivers, laserguns — and some of them are completely over the top — things like gatling sluggers, super plasma guns, and the golden nuke launcher. Either way, power isn’t everything — the more powerful weapons take longer to reload and use more ammo, and if you run out of ammo, you’re going to have a pretty pathetic end to your run.

As you kill enemies and bosses in the wastelands, your mutant will gain radiation — or rads — that help your mutant achieve mutations. There are almost 30 mutations in the game — but you’ll only get to pick from a random selection of four at any time. Some of them are fun, some of them are practical, and some of them are very situational.

Scarier Face is a good one to come across, because it lowers the health on every enemy you come across. Impact Wrists — which increases the force your weaponry has on enemies, slinging them further away — works wonders when you’re playing with the mutant Melting, whose active ability allows you to blow up corpses from a distance. Or you might want to avoid Euphoria when you’re playing as Crystal, because her shield ability reflects bullets, and Euphoria slows down all projectiles in the game.

And that’s just the core of Nuclear Throne. As you struggle to figure out a way to beat the game’s areas and bosses, there are dozens of useful and less useful secrets to find — things called crowns, secret characters, areas, endings, cursed weapons, and all sorts of mysterious meta.

There are dozens of ways to enhance your run, or to make it harder. And if you feel like you’re ready to show off, we’ve got you covered, too. Play couch co-op with a friend, or participate in our daily challenge and a weekly challenge to show off your skills against everybody else.

Nuclear Throne will have an exclusive console launch on PlayStation platforms, and we’re looking forward to seeing how you do not reach the Throne.

We started Luftrausers halfway through 2011, when Jan Willem at Vlambeer was staring out of a window on a late flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam after the annual Game Developers Conference. He decided he wanted to expand on a little prototype we made back in 2010.

The pitch Jan Willem had for me was simple: the prototype had been made in two days, but had been played by hundreds of thousands of people. Jan Willem felt we might’ve run into something special with the simple high score game we had released for free to the internet. We started working on the very first version of our little 2D dogfighting game in just four colors.

We made a deal not to play the original until the new version was as good as we remembered the original to be, and we were surprised at how much of a struggle that was. We added bigger explosions, we worked on a dynamic camera system, we added trails of smoke on crashing jets, and we even added extra colors to the palette. It still took us almost a month to achieve the same level of speed, of chaos, and of impact that the far simpler original had.

When we played the original again for the first time, we were baffled. Compared to our updated builds of Luftrausers we’d been playing, the old version felt stale. You know that feeling when you’re talking about an old game that you love, and when you play it it falls flat? That’s because your memories of a game aren’t as much about what actually happens on screen, but about how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking while playing it.

Our original game made people feel like the best fighter pilot in the world, as if they skimmed right over the water line taking out a squadron of enemy fighters. Luftrausers actually allowed you to do that.

In other words, we decided to commit to Luftrausers. We reached out to our good friends at Devolver Digital to help us out. They looked at it, nodded sagely, and proceeded to send us a contract for us to sign without question.

Shahid was next on our list of people we wanted to talk to. We loved working with him on Super Crate Box for PlayStation Mobile, so we met up with him in a little food place just across from the PlayStation offices in England. He asked what we were working on and we pitched Luftrausers to him. Shahid, without exaggeration, proceeded to negotiate with us on the spot, scribbled down the name of the game on a coaster, added a few terms to the thing, and went back to the offices.

We expanded the team on Luftrausers with additional programmers. We thought we’d be good to hit the spring of 2012. That turned out to be overly hopeful.

Vlambeer has made games for PC and for mobile — successful games that have won awards and had hundreds of thousands of players. Console development is a completely new story for us, though. We needed time to adapt, to figure out how to make things work, and make them work perfectly. On PC, the variety of configurations means you have to accept that it won’t work exactly the same on every computer; with a console, you have the one exact specification and there’s this automatic urge to make everything flawless. In a strange way, it’s kind of addicting.

We got stuck in that little loop of trying to make Luftrausers better for almost a year and a half, and we started showing what was essentially a finished game at events around the world. If you’re a fan of ours, chances are that you’ve played it and talked to us at one of those events. We took your feedback home, and we’d polish the game a bit more before taking it out to the next event.

Luftrausers is ready.

Instead of one airplane, Luftrausers suddenly allowed you to build 125 airplanes. Instead of one pumping KOZILEK soundtrack, Luftrausers now features one for every airplane you can build. The amount of enemies doubled, the amount of colors doubled, the amount of effects quadrupled, and mechanically we added missions and combos.

We had scoped small, but we knew we weren’t doing the game justice that way. We kept working as the launch date slipped, and then the new launch date slipped as well. We weren’t quite where we wanted yet. Eventually it was 2013, and people stopped giving suggestions on how they’d improve the game at events. We were ready to wrap up.

Throughout the difficult QA process, the teams at Devolver Digital and PlayStation have been extremely supportive of a new studio trying to find its place in the console world, and we really appreciate everything they’ve done for us over the past year and a half. We know how to make good, tight arcade games, and they helped us figure out how to bring that Vlambeer-style gameplay you know to consoles.

Luftrausers is ready. We’re proud and excited to bring it to PS3 and PS Vita today, and we can’t wait for you to finally get your hands on it. With more than 125 Luftrausers to build — each with a unique soundtrack — there are many ways to take on the ridiculously overwhelming amount of action we’re about to throw your way.

Get ready to raus!

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/03/18/luftrausers-launches-today-on-ps3-ps-vita/feed/26http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/luft.jpg3.82Vlambeer260Wasteland Kings Hitting PS4, PS Vita in 2014http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/08/21/wasteland-kings-hitting-ps4-ps-vita-in-2014/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/08/21/wasteland-kings-hitting-ps4-ps-vita-in-2014/#commentsWed, 21 Aug 2013 16:00:32 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=113742Vlambeer has been around for almost three years.

It’s sort of a weird realization for the two of us that the past three years of our lives — practically every moment after we decided to run a games company full time — has been dedicated to making the games people know us for. It’s been an amazing run that’s taken us from extreme highs to emotional lows, and introduced us to so many amazing people – whether they’re developers or industry or fans.

Vlambeer is something weird. You see, the two of us are polar opposites. Whereas JW is an artistic and creative force full of weird ideas, I tend to do business and programming. If you’ve ever put two people like that in a single room, you know they don’t tend to get along well. That was true for the two of us as well, and we created this third person that resulted from the collision between us. That third person is what Vlambeer truly is — it’s neither Jan Willem nor me. It’s a separate “person.”

The reason I’m explaining all this is because it is important to explain what the game we just announced for PS4 and PS Vita is.

Vlambeer started in September 2010. Since then, we made Super Crate Box, in which you can never predict what’s next due to the randomness, but you can learn how the system works to gain situational awareness. We’re still wrapping up LUFTRAUSERS, a game that focuses on customization and finding something that fits your own playing style. We made Ridiculous Fishing, a game in which we integrated a deep fiction into an otherwise simple game design.

These games are all explorations of things we find interesting or cool or weird. Things we ran across in a documentary, or while watching a movie, or reading a book, or browsing the internet.

When we originally made Wasteland Kings in 72 hours for Mojang’s charity game jam, the limited amount of time just meant we made something that felt natural to us. We’re good at arcade action gameplay, so we ended up making that. Jan Willem had been toying around with random generation a lot, so that went in. We’re both fans of bad science fiction, so the game is very much inspired by sci-fi movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

After the jam we were intrigued by Wasteland Kings, and it took us a moment to figure out why. Wasteland Kings is an action roguelike-like about never being able to predict what’s next due to randomness. It’s a top-down shooter in which focusing on customization and finding something that fits your own playing style. It’s a game in which we’re integrating a deep fiction into an otherwise simple game design. It’s everything we’ve made before, but it’s also something new.

Wasteland Kings is a tribute to Vlambeer. That doesn’t make it a tribute to ourselves, really – like we explained, Vlambeer isn’t either of us. The game – which you’ll be able to play on PS4 and PS Vita next year – is a tribute to this crazy thing that changed our lives so much in such a short time. And it’s a game, because that’s the only way we know to properly make a tribute to it.

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/08/21/wasteland-kings-hitting-ps4-ps-vita-in-2014/feed/14http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/wastelands.jpg4.65Vlambeer140Just One More Minute: Taking to the Skies in LUFTRAUSERShttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/05/21/just-one-more-minute-taking-to-the-skies-in-luftrausers/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/05/21/just-one-more-minute-taking-to-the-skies-in-luftrausers/#commentsTue, 21 May 2013 19:43:13 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=106794

LUFTRAUSERS is a short game. To be precise, it takes about thirty seconds. We’re not talking in terms of hours you need to complete the campaign, although you technically could beat it within two minutes. We’re not even talking about how many hours you’ll be playing the game in total. What we’re talking about is the amount of time a single round of LUFTRAUSERS is going to take you.

When you boot the game for the first time on your PlayStation 3 or PS Vita, you’ll see the logos of Vlambeer and Devolver Digital – as you’d expect. There’ll be a short introductory cutscene, as a lone dot appears on enemy radar. A submarine rises from the water.

The structure of the game is really simple. You start out with the original LUFTRAUSER, the most powerful airplane ever built. It is launched perfectly vertical from a submarine that only submerges for the shortest of moments to allow you to establish yourself as the nightmare of the many enemies surrounding you.

A game of LUFTRAUSERS is essentially you trying to survive against increasing odds. While at first you might engage only basic fighter planes, it’ll take an average player just moments to lure out more powerful foes – fighter jets and boats. You’ll pull impressive maneuvers to dodge their fire while returning a constant spray of bullets. Only every now and then will you release the fire button to allow your airplane to repair itself. Eventually, you succumb to the crossfire in a glorious explosion.

This should be about thirty seconds after you boot up the game.

If you were good at the game, you’d be fighting the final boss in approximately sixty seconds. Of course, you just got started so you’re probably terrible at the game, although admittedly, you probably did pull some crazy acrobatics.

You start over and the game introduces missions that you can complete to unlock new LUFTRAUSER parts. While you slowly start to come to grips with the game and clear some missions, your average game time is still under fifty seconds. You might’ve seen a larger sea vessel at this point, but they’re mighty enemies that you simply cannot manage to defeat.
We don’t think a ‘run’ has to be long. We think that at the end of each run, you should feel like you know what you did wrong or what you could do better.

You start unlocking parts – engines, weapons and body parts that you can combine to create 125 different combinations of LUFTRAUSER. Do you build a slower, but more heavily armored RAUSER with a heavy weapon and a submarine engine to take those larger, new boats? Maybe you prefer speed over armor, and maybe you like to get in close for melee damage?

As you learn to survive longer, your combos rack up higher. Your scores keep increasing. You start to understand how the game works and how each LUFTRAUSER handles. If you want to be truly good at this game, there are many more challenges you need to master. From enemy aces equipped with machineguns to classified entities – there’s a lot to learn before you can call yourself worthy of a real LUFTRAUSER pilot.

From our playtests we can tell you that an average game of LUFTRAUSERS is sixty-eight seconds. In that time, people kill about seventy to a hundred enemies. We can also tell you that about 30% of players have managed to ‘complete the game’ including the final boss.

We wanted to make a game about becoming the best fighter pilot in the world. If you’re willing to rise to that challenge, you’ll be meandering your favorite RAUSER through clouds of bullets, picking off stray foes and shooting down enemies a hundred times your size. We promise you though, that will not come easy. It will take practice.

We wanted to create a game that gets to the point without nonsense. We wanted to create a game that doesn’t hold your hand, that allows you to fail and get better.

Well, that and we really like explosions and absurd amounts of screen shake.

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/05/21/just-one-more-minute-taking-to-the-skies-in-luftrausers/feed/33http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/luftrausters.jpg4.29Vlambeer3312LUFTRAUSERS Dogfights its Way to PS3 and PS Vitahttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/03/21/luftrausers-dogfights-its-way-to-ps3-and-ps-vita/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/03/21/luftrausers-dogfights-its-way-to-ps3-and-ps-vita/#commentsThu, 21 Mar 2013 16:00:20 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=102394PS3 and PS Vita is because we loved working with Sony when we made Super Crate Box. We think both platforms are great and we obviously want you to be able to play our games - but we don't like dealing with people that treat us as some sort of commercial asset only. We want to work with people that love games as much as we love working on them.]]>

Hey there PlayStation.Blog, it’s been a few months! Last time we spoke was before we released Super Crate Box for PlayStation Mobile – and since then we’ve been working on games on other platforms. One of those games was LUFTRAUSERS, a dogfighting game about flying and building your own LUFTRAUSER airplane.

We’ll be honest with you – the reason this game is going to hit PS3 and PS Vita is because we loved working with Sony when we made Super Crate Box. We think both platforms are great and we obviously want you to be able to play our games – but we don’t like dealing with people that treat us as some sort of commercial asset only. We want to work with people that love games as much as we love working on them.

Think of it this way: we’re a two-man studio that is investing a lot of time into making a game about shooting airplanes that is fun, explosive and makes you feel like the best pilot in the world. We want to be spending time on that, not on having nitpicky negotiations about ‘does the game fulfill random checklist item three’.

We had to deal with barely any of that red tape. Thanks the team at Devolver Digital? (the same crew that are working with Dennaton Games to bring you Hotline Miami) and the people we’ve been working with at Sony, we’ve been able to get right to what matters most: making a fun game about airplanes for people to enjoy on their PlayStation devices. So instead of worrying about that sort of thing, we’ve been working hard to balance the game so you’re always in the heat of battle, we’ve been adding more impossible missions and most importantly, we’ve been making the plane crashes more satisfying.

Working on this game we slowly realized that that is what LUFTRAUSERS is about: it’s about being the best fighter pilot in the world. It’s about barely dodging that homing missile that would’ve ended your run just short of your high score. It’s about finishing a minute-long tense battle with a huge airship. It’s a fighter jet crashing into a boat and sinking it. And most importantly, it’s about doing all of the above in the span of seconds, while pulling acrobatic moves with the best airplane in the world.

And when it’s over and the dust clears from your glorious defeat, you head back into the hangar and think – ‘what if I tried it with a laser mounted instead of a machinegun?’

We can’t wait to see which of over 125 airplane combinations will be your favorite.

]]>http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/03/21/luftrausers-dogfights-its-way-to-ps3-and-ps-vita/feed/42http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/luftrausers.jpg4.46Vlambeer420PlayStation Mobile: The Story of Super Crate Boxhttp://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/10/03/playstation-mobile-the-story-of-super-crate-box/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2012/10/03/playstation-mobile-the-story-of-super-crate-box/#commentsWed, 03 Oct 2012 17:00:28 +0000http://blog.us.playstation.com/?p=86484Playstation Mobile, it’ll be available for PlayStation Vita and other PlayStation Certified Devices, too.
For the uninitiated, Super Crate Box is an action-arcade game in which you control a little guy tasked with collecting as many crates as possible while fending off enemies and avoiding your impending death. Every crate you pick up randomly changes your method of attack, so you'd better be ready for anything.
When Sony reached out to us a few months ago to have Super Crate Box launch with PSM, we sent a request to friends and fellow coders to help us out developing it within the limited time we had left to launch.]]>

It’s been a while since Super Crate Box originally debuted as a PC download and put the two of us here at Vlambeer in the worldwide spotlight for arcade games. Today, Super Crate Box is available on Mac, Steam and iOS. With the launch of Playstation Mobile, it’ll be available for PlayStation Vita and other PlayStation Certified Devices, too.

For the uninitiated, Super Crate Box is an action-arcade game in which you control a little guy tasked with collecting as many crates as possible while fending off enemies and avoiding your impending death. Every crate you pick up randomly changes your method of attack, so you’d better be ready for anything.

When Sony reached out to us a few months ago to have Super Crate Box launch with PSM, we sent a request to friends and fellow coders to help us out developing it within the limited time we had left to launch. We received some great, professional applications and a single e-mail from a fan. The fan turned out to be an avid Super Crate Box player, and an experienced programmer to boot. He made a small side-note: he would only be able to work at night, because during the day he had a job as a bus-driver. Easy choice.

The game shaped up rapidly and before we knew it, a young man in his bus-driver uniform was working at the office with us to test an early build on a PlayStation Vita. Immediately we knew: we spent ages on perfecting the iOS touch-controls, creating what we still believe are amongst the best touch controls ever – but on PS Vita, Super Crate Box feels right at home; it’s portable, it’s fast and it’s precise.

We’re really looking forward to hearing about your high scores in the comments – the iOS version has 2000+ crates as highscore. After October 3rd, we’ll see for once and for all what physical buttons are worth.

For those of you who’re about to play the game for the first time ever: our sincere apologies for the discgun.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on PlayStation.Blog for information about how to get PSM games such as Super Crate Box onto your PlayStation Vita or other PlayStation-certified device after the PSM launch.